Loving Sabotage

Amélie Nothomb

The narrator of Loving Sabotage (Le sabotage amoureux) is five when
she arrives in Beijing in 1972 as the daughter of a Belgian diplomat.
She joins the other children roaming unsupervised in the diplomatic
enclave, engaged in a war which pits everyone else against the East
Germans. She is happy with her status as a pathfinder and her expeditions
on her bicycle — which she has convinced herself is a horse — until,
when she is seven, she falls madly in love with the six year old Italian
girl who moves in next door. This story is autobiographical; in an
afterward Nothomb claims everything in it is true.

The children's war is carried out with a nastiness that only children
could envisage: the Allies' Secret Weapon involves a bathtub filled with
their collected urine. Parental control is limited — when a truce with
the East Germans is eventually enforced, the children simply declare war
on the Nepalese — and even the Chinese authorities are happily defied.

"In that nightmare of a country, the adult foreigners lived
depressed and uneasy lives. What they saw revolted them; what
they didn't see revolted them even more.

Their children, however, were having the time of their lives."

Nothomb's anguished unrequited love offers a counterpoint to this,
with her futile attempts to gain the affections of the precocious femme
fatale Elena. And then there's her teacher, who tries to make the class
write a collective story...

Loving Sabotage treats the experiences of childhood seriously, but
there's no pretence that the viewpoint is that of a child. Nothomb
explains and reinterprets her experiences with the benefit of later
learning — "In 1974, I read neither Wittgenstein nor Baudelaire nor
even The People's Daily". There's no room for anything profound, but
she includes some shrewd observations: on China under the Gang of Four,
on the way Westerners perceive China, and on the nature of love.

The tone is light-hearted but the sentiment serious, combining the
emotional intensity of the child and the intellectual perspective of the
adult, the innocence of youth and the insights of age. And it's all done
deftly, with prose that perfectly balances the competing demands on it.
Loving Sabotage is a glorious little novel.